Oakland Writer, Poet and Editor Paul Corman-Roberts Blog » Paul Corman-Roberts

Live and Direct from the Elbo Room

Paul Corman-Roberts — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 23:27:17 +0000

This is my short set from last Friday night’s QUIET LIGHTNING VI. Did I mention it was a gas reading with Stephen Elliot, Sara Fran Wisby, Michelle Tea, Daphne Gottlieb, Jon Longhi, MG Martin, AP Nelson, Jennifer Joseph, Nic Alea, Joshua Mohr, and Beth Lisick.

Paul Reads “The Longest 20 Seconds” and “The Serv-Well.”

26 in 30

Paul Corman-Roberts — Sun, 02 May 2010 16:50:41 +0000

30 poems in 30 days for the month of April?

I’m not gonna complain for only making 26 new poems (many of which SUCK!!) I get that’s not the point of 30 in 30. It’s been incredibly valuable to me to have this exercise; this campaign if you will.

Big shout out/thank you to Daphne Gottlieb for informing me of this month-long exercise. I think it was pretty good for her too. She took time out from a maniacal outpouring of words to ask me if I was doing the 30 in 30 Challenge and I got that perplexed crease in my brow and promptly asked “What’s that?”

Now each and every April now, I will not forget that! Now we’ll see if we can get this sweet creative outpouring to translate into some productive fiction for the month of May…something else I just learned! Can’t they have a monthly newsletter for tortured prose writers somewhere?

East Bay On The Brain

Paul Corman-Roberts — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:55:28 +0000

Escape from the Crow’s Nest: The Triumph of the Self

Paul Corman-Roberts — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:55:23 +0000

Don’t know if I posted here, but here I will post again if so.

Thank you dear friends. Please find here the presentation of Triumph of the Self at my dearly beloved Crow.

Or find it here below:

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SELF

I can pinpoint the exact moment the campaign to destroy the word “no” was lost. The effort was doomed to the fate of a vagrant or imprisoned behind blood stained crystalline cages the moment it discovered its “self.”

Profoundest apologies; I am misleading you once again (though you already knew that.) What I mean to say is that the campaign to eradicate the word “no” was hung with this destiny around its neck as soon as it discovered the means by which the “self” is discovered.

A small expedition from the compound embarked into Albino Moonbeam to see if the segments of the preserve that had disappeared had perhaps relocated to the water’s edge or even perhaps across the shores.

All they found was a small cache’ of comically shaped eyepieces which, when fixed upon any one given object, revealed that object’s primal subatomic structure in the clearest detail.

We discovered very quickly that every object in the universe we could know was made out of tiny, submicroscopic mirrors. The ground we walk on, the air we breathe, the gruel we consume to sustain our skins…all of it is forever reflecting back at us whether we are aware of it or not.

Quite simply, this discovery was the end of us.

The comical eyepieces became an entertainment industry unto themselves which no one in any caste…not the Elohim; not the vested; not the unvested, not the stringers, nor the campaigners, sanctioned or otherwise, could resist their endless surprises & revelations. After a few cycles of our satellite there was not one citizen without several of these devices. The most amusing game certainly was “self reflecting”…looking through the comically shaped eyepieces at a macro-sized mirror back at one’s corporeal body. In essence: the infinite re-reflection of the self back into nothing but the device of reflection itself.

Great, bleeding slabs of the “no” eradication movement abandoned their posts to see the wonder of themselves exposed in ways they could have never seen themselves previously. Many crossed over from unvested to vested by selling these astounding devices, or at least by attaching themselves to the industry of caring & maintaining these eyepieces which quickly sprung up around the trade of this new, revolutionary commodity. Of course, most of the markets were targeted toward the Elohim themselves, for who else possessed more resources, nay who was more willing to part with their considerable resources in order to more fully worship at the altar of the “self?”

Not for one second do I believe any of this was an accident.

The Abomunauts Are Coming To Piss On Your Lawn

Paul Corman-Roberts — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:03:56 +0000

Paul Corman Roberts video reading performance of his title poem from his first book:

Memoir for the Coming World and a Preview of the Gone World

Escape from SF Public Library

Paul Corman-Roberts — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:35:42 +0000

My first published fiction:

Double Lanes at 42opus:

Thank you Brian!

Interview With Oakland Political Poet Lenore Weiss

Paul Corman-Roberts — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:35:06 +0000

PCR: How defined do you think is the line between technology connecting people and alternately alienating them? LW: I’m on the side of connection because you know technology is just a tool after all, which like anything else, can be used or not used for enlightened purposes – bombs over Baghdad or solar roofs over Miami. Similar questions were asked about television and I think the real danger, or the real question is: who controls those tools? When the internet first came on the scene a lot of people from the 60’s really gravitated toward that, particularly because the idea of communicating…the potential of that type of communicating…I can remember for the first time talking in real time over a monitor to someone across town and that just blew me away. PCR: But how do you manage to keep technology in service of the human without the lapsing of the human into the service of the technology? Or is a little bit of both needed to balance out the process? LW: Walter (Lowenfels) wrote a little book called, "The Revolution is to be Human." In the final analysis, I believe that's the real revolution. Unless we can continue to evolve our consciousness, humankind may very well be doomed to destroy ourselves and this planet. But I'm an optimist. PCR: In your essay “The Empty Nestrance,” your initial meeting with Lowenfels makes it sounds like he flagged you down on the edges of a seminar hall while you prowled the grounds impatiently. How was it that he became aware of you? It seems he had a notion of who you were. LW: My anti(Vietnam) war poem had appeared in "Dialog" magazine which was published under the auspices of the CPUSA's Cultural Commission. This is how Walter first became aware of me. He was an expatriate who had been in Europe around the same times as Hemingway and Stein. When he came back, he put together this anthology about the war in Vietnam (The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969) and he wrote extensively about the “White Poetry Mafia” because at that time, black poets were getting no exposure. Walter would take authors like Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major under his wing, and I was going to visit him and his wife Lillian every weekend and he was the first person to publish a poem of mine. I have a long history of wonderful teachers in how I came to writing. My father was born in Hungary and my mother was born in the US of Hungarian immigrants, and they both loved poetry. My mother would read poetry to us every evening. She loved Longfellow, and my father really enjoyed the work of Sandor Petofi who was one of the truly great national Hungarian poets; Petofi in particular because he wrote of the need for Hungarian liberation from the Hapsburg empire in the mid 19th Century. Those were some of my very first influences. My father was in the Communist Party, not when he was raising us, so I was not a red diaper baby in that sense, but those influences were very much around me. I’m a 60’s person, so I grew up with my ears open to what was happening in the U.S. at that time. When I got my masters at SF State I became very friendly with William Dickey. At the time he was the head of the Department and also charged with setting up the school's computer lab. Bill worked with me on my Master’s Thesis, and then we’d hang out at his house and he would read my tarot, and we’d have a drink and such. He was my daughters godfather, we were quite close. He, like myself and Lowenfels, had a great interest in the relationship between language and technology, and its impact on writing. This is where he and I really connected. We corresponded across the Bay about this subject for years. We both felt that as writers it would be a mistake to ignore the enormous impact that technology was and continues to have on language, and how we relate to each other through that electronic stratosphere. I’ve been involved with technology all my working life, and I think it has impacted our generation and our age more than anything else, and thus our communications and our relationships. Now after years of sitting behind a computer screen, I'm becoming increasingly bombarded by information via these low-resolution screens that are unable to communicate the richness and complexity of experience. I'm hoping to write about that subject more. But it's still a part of my paying attention to the relationship between technology and language.